Companion viewing
"The Wedding Banquet" (1993)
"Eat Drink Man Woman" (1994)
"Crazy Rich Asians" (2018)
The poster for "The Farewell" proclaims that is is based on an "actual lie."
“The Farewell” was a hit at Sundance earlier this year. The film's director, Lulu Wang, stopped by the KPBS studios to explain how a lie is the basis for a true story.
"Well it was my way, I guess, to say this is based on a true story," Wang said with a smile. "But even the true story itself is about a lie that was told to my actual grandmother. The lie was that we were all coming home to China for the wedding of my cousin. But in fact the wedding was staged by my family as an excuse to see my grandmother and say goodbye to her because she had cancer and the doctor told her she had three months to live. But they decided not to tell her that she was ill. And so that's why the wedding was necessary so she wouldn't be suspicious when everybody suddenly rushed home to see her."
"The Farewell" began as an episode of "This American Life" back in April 2016. Wang had wanted to make the story into a film but she could not find a producer willing to let her tell it her way. So she wrote it all down, chronicling how her family lied to her grandmother and the story got picked up by "This American Life."
"And as soon as it aired, within 48 hours producers were calling me to make it into a film. And what that did was it gave me the ability to pick the producer who would ultimately fight for my vision and my version of the story," Wang said.
Considering that the story involves a grandmother given a few months to live you might expect it to be tragic or grim but the film strikes a surprisingly humorous tone as it examines the dynamics of a family driven by two different cultural forces. It is often very funny but it also strikes deeply poignant moments. It's a film with many layers and it unfolds with delicate care.
"It's not a story where there's a right or wrong," Wang explained. "It's not a story about plot. It's a story about what it feels like as a family when you are separated by an ocean and you start to change based on the country where you move to. You start to have different value systems and then what it means when you go back to your home country and you see the differences between you and that family that you left and you still love them. But you see the world in very different ways. And so I didn't want to tell a story where it was all about the wedding and the banquet and the broad comedy of that. It's a very high concept story and a lot of hilarity ensues. But it was very important to me to portray a specific type of humor and not a kind of humor where you're making fun of people or laughing at the family but where you really are sympathetic to what they're going through."
At one point Billi (Wang's alter ego in the film and played to perfection by Awkwafina) questions the family's motives in lying to her grandmother and wonders if telling the truth might be a better option. But her uncle points to the telling differences between Eastern and Western cultures. He says that by telling Grandma the truth it relieves the rest of the family of responsibility and places the burden of the situation on the dying woman but by lying that burden is borne by the whole family.
"I think there's a fundamental difference between Eastern and Western culture," Wang said. "And I'm sure you can make a similar comparison with many cultures that are non-American. I think that in America we very much value the individual, freedom, truth. But in China, I won't speak for everybody else, but in China it's very much about the collective. It's about family, it's about society. And there's this notion of the things that we do to carry someone's burden for them that it isn't up to them to decide how do I deal with this. But there's just a collective vision and that's what's so beautiful, but it also comes with its own challenges and pressures."
Wang captures all those cultural differences with a graceful and deeply compassionate tone.
Listen to Wang's full interview on Cinema Junkie Podcast.
